Beam me up, Facebook

It’s easy to link your existing typeracer.com account to the Facebook app. When you do, your completed races on typeracer.com will appear on Facebook and vice-vera. To link your accounts, click on “My Account” under your name (as seen on the above screenshot) after you’ve installed the application. Just enter your typeracer.com username and password into the box that pops up, and you’re done! From this point on, you’ll be able to race from either typeracer.com or Facebook as you choose (but be sure to still race from inside Facebook every once in a while so that your typing speed gets updated on the Info tab of your Facebook profile).

Naturally, you’ll also want to invite your friends to race you, because the Facebook app shows a score chart just for you and your friends. Where is Liutenant Sulu on this chart? Invite him, please!

Let everyone know you’re serious about typing (and racing) by installing this small Facebook profile badge to show off your skills! You’ll see a grey button for installing this widget above the racing screen on the app’s main page:

You might also want to boldly go where no tab has gone before and put your Facebook account into warp speed with the TypeRacer profile tab:

The profile tab can be installed in a similar way as the profile badge

I really encourage you to try the Facebook app if you haven’t already. TypeRacer is one the very few apps that doesn’t force you to install it just to try it. It also doesn’t force you to invite 20 of your friends to advance to the next level or get a hundred bucks in fake money. If you’ve used other Facebook apps, you’ll know how annoying that is. Unfortunately, not having those dirty tricks makes it harder for a new app to become popular on Facebook. That’s why we need your help to spread the word. Let’s show them that apps can be successful without being annoying!

33 Responses to “Beam me up, Facebook”

This is great advertising for TypeRacer to focus on the Facebook “app”. I have several friends who might try out racing this way.

Was there any functionality added (e.g. is the profile tab new) with this update, or is this purely marketing?

I actually think we have a good user-base right now, although it would be nice to recruit and/or keep some more really fast racers – they are a bit of a rare breed these days. But there are almost always lots of racers at any given time. It would be good to see some of the frequent requests addressed, so that our new “recruits” from Facebook and elsewhere will stay around longer.

Yes, this post is just to let people know about the Facebook app. There hasn’t been any new functionality added to it, but I’m getting very close to finishing up a major new release that will improve TypeRacer’s functionality overall. I’ll be announcing that soon.

We really need more users on Facebook so that the TypeRacer app can attain its rightful place there. Currently, the (kinda weak) copycat Facebook app “Typing Race”, which ripped everything off from us (including the VW beetle cars) has twice as many users there. Last summer I chose to focus on improving the core gameplay of typeracer.com (fixing bugs, creating user accounts), instead of creating a Facebook app, but in the meantime the developer of “Typing Race” launched his rip-off. I guess imitation is flattery, but it would be nice if TypeRacer rightfully attained the #1 slot it deserves on Facebook. That’s why we gotta step up the marketing effort on Facebook 🙂

Ha! thanks for the question, Anonymous, I didn’t think my organ playing was widely known 😛

I think that any sort of 10-finger-precision activity – like piano, organ, and various uses of computer keyboards – is going to help improve typing. Good pianists aren’t necessarily good typers, and vice versa, but I think the skills translate well: regularly practicing the moving of your fingers very quickly and precisely.

Practicing scales on the piano is somewhat like practicing common words in typing – once you get them fluent and very quick, you can always call on that resource and everything else is indirectly improved as well.

How is typeracer a job… u get monthly payment? I’m just a part timer (student) learned touch typing just 8 months ago.. and not like the 150+ guyz around. I am thinking about data entry becoz my parents insisted.. as they say that I am wasting my time typing some passages somewhere and should try to make it into some sort of part time income..

In the future, it might be nice for users to not recieve a loss when they race against cheaters.

For example, just now I was cruising along comfortably at 147wpm when all of a sudden some guy achieved 165pm out of nowhere… his average speed was around 50wpm, so it’s obvious cheating, and he did not pass the anti-cheat test.

Admittedly, this might be more work than it’s worth, but I’m just throwing it out there.

How do I sign up? I’ve been to the website and clicking on the “sign me up” links does not work. I’d like to sign up and practice and introduce my Keyboarding I students this summer semester to a fun way to practice, but it’s not working. Help?!

How is typeracer a job… u get monthly payment? I’m just a part timer (student) learned touch typing just 8 months ago.. and not like the 150+ guyz around. I am thinking about data entry becoz my parents insisted.. as they say that I am wasting my time typing some passages somewhere and should try to make it into some sort of part time income..

Does anyone else have problems with graphs displaying in Firefox? When I first used Typeracer I had no problems, but about 6 months ago they stopped working. This is what it looks like for me when I look at my scores:

p.s. interesting race history valikor. why do you think your scores fluctuate so widely, e.g. 120’s in one race, 150’s or 160’s in the next? that’s a huge range. is it mostly effort? or difficulty of text?

p.p.s. activity in the blog comments has really died down in the past few weeks. we need a forum!

Sometimes I can be in the zone, and other times I can be in a very bad mood for typing. This makes a big difference. But in general, the text is the biggest factor causing fluctuation, since I don’t race when I just woke up or have cold hands or something like that 🙂

On the easiest texts I average 145, and on the hardest texts I average around 120.

Of course, the faster you type the more variation you can expect. I assume, though, that the percentage is the same (about 10%), and that the variation just seems more drastic since it involves higher numbers.

oh zoran..
accusing me of cheat or what is this? 😛
Sometimes its just, when you type the wrong letter you just give up. And sometimes my fingers are too crusty and i dont feel like typing insane fast, but when the “best” text comes up for me i’ll always type faster.

I got a problem. I had linked my original typeracer account to my facebook account. However, the results I type on my original account failed to connect to facebook. And a new account named “Man Paperpack” (my facebook account name) was created. I can’t find ways to log in to this new account, but the result there is linked to my facebook when I hoped to publish them on my profile. I hope have an account named same as my facebook account (Man Paperpack) which will linked to my facebook profile directly, also it will have the original result of my account on typeracer (paperpack). How can I do that? Thanks for your help!

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